


cure for death

by RaspberryDawn



Category: Smosh
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Androids, Artificial Intelligence, Character Death, Dubious Ethics, Dubious Science, Genetic Engineering, Grief/Mourning, Infidelity, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Moral Ambiguity, Protectiveness, Science Experiments, Surrogacy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-12-21
Packaged: 2019-01-07 03:23:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12224730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RaspberryDawn/pseuds/RaspberryDawn
Summary: “The fact you’re calling it a ‘he’ means you’ve already personified it. It’s not your dead husband, it’s an artificial creation meant to duplicate him.  That doesn’t mean it’s him. He’s still dead. You can’t marry an artificial intelligence.”----In the year 2xxx, things are different. They should be simpler, especially to a mastermind genes-splicing scientist like Nicholas Uhas. But the real challenge isn't losing his husband Damien, it's the android synth he's helped craft to replace him. Though Nick would bet his soul that the creation is a perfect replica, the head psychologist at the facility would deny it -- despite Dr Shayne Topp's direct involvement with artificial intelligence creation and the fact Damien had been his best friend while alive.Told with occasional murky flashbacks to share their history, this sci-fi AU offers a good bit of moral and ethical ambiguity as well as hints that things are deeper than what they seem.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> oh boy do I have a story for y'all
> 
> I'm pretty sure this would be better received with different pairings, but hey. if you already clicked this, give it a shot. what do you have to lose except minutes off your life?
> 
> you'll note that there is a definitive 'X out of X chapters' listed, and yes, everything is plotted and what not, and about 35% of the actual writing done I'd say. while I'm sticking to everything I have written out, it seems some parts are longer than originally intended, is the thing. so instead of huge chapters (fanfic-wise) over 4k words I'm trying to split off at about that length each time.

It started in a room where they are forced to talk to one another again.

From the word ‘forced’ alone it went without needing to be acknowledged that neither of them wanted this. If they had ever decided to talk again, it wouldn’t be with such a forced opening of all of their wounds.

But Shayne Topp took his job seriously, even if it was being told to speak to one of the last people he wanted to.

In contrast to most of the environment they lived their day to day in, the room was small and cramped. It lacked the white lighting and blue luminescence of most things around the laboratory, being that it was Shayne’s personal office. He had been with the company long enough to have just made his office gradually a second home. 

He knew that Nick on the other hand kept his home as sterile as the labs he worked in. He looked uncomfortable in a pressed houndstooth blue and white shirt and khaki slacks, just out of place amidst the plush seating decorated in earth tones as the rest of the office was.

It seemed like his eyes were being drawn to the bookcase ever so often too, but Nicholas Uhas didn’t seem as if he wanted to speak.

Shayne could only do so much writing down some notes in a pre-prepared form that he had to complete before he actually would need to force conversation to happen. The company didn’t like their scientists to be emotional, and it seemed all anything Nick did lately was emotions based. 

It hadn’t been unnoticed by staff.

Just as he started to open his mouth, Nick went ahead and blurted out a simple four word phrase.

“He looks very real.” 

It was time to just dive in, then.

“The fact you’re calling it a ‘he’ means you’ve already personified it. It’s not your dead husband, it’s an artificial creation meant to duplicate him. That doesn’t mean it’s him. He’s still dead. You can’t marry an artificial intelligence.” 

“I thought psychology was more of a soft science, Shayne. Who are you to say it isn’t just an extension, a continuation of him? He’s not a robot with gears inside; there is part of your best friend still in there.”

The blond wasn’t going to be swayed. The idea of the conversation already made him tired, but it gave him a steadfast resolve to not want to move a single opinion. These were things he had long thought about.

“It’s a product that is sold to people just like you. They’re sold looking like children, or looking like lost parents, all in order to tug at people’s hearts. They don’t have to be perfect, because people will overlook that for the nostalgia. You should know that. It’s not the same as him being around still. Here – here’s a good question. Do you have sex with it?”

The question seemed to come entirely from left field. Nick’s face looked a bit crestfallen and ill even, but he seemed to try and contain himself. It was just that no matter how far advanced humanity was, men would love to talk about sex unless they weren’t having it. 

“It looks just like him; you say the thing is him. So do you have sex with it? Or are you smart enough to realize it’d be no different from a sex toy then?”

“Now that’s not true.”

The blond sneered a bit as he squinted his eyes at the other. The man was a doctor, for christ’s sake, a brilliant geneticist who had helped revolutionize the world. Yet here he was, balking on a question about sex, concerned and disgusted at a simple question. The part about him being smart was what Shayne now was reconsidering, seeing as Nick had just said something wasn’t true.

“Would you raise a child with it?”

“I – sure. I would.”

“You would raise your child with it?”

“Stop calling him an it.”

There was the sort of righteous indignation in his voice that Shayne heard all the time as a psychologist by people who were in denial. When they were confronted with something they wanted to avoid, they would shift the conversation around.

It was particularly suspect that all he had done was present the same question again, and that was all it took to get Nick to try and defend himself from an imaginary threat.

“Biological matter. He has some of Damien’s…components, let’s call them that. Maybe in part, the body is an organic material. But only in part, because it will outlive and outlast you far longer than we maybe have the capacity to even understand. I want to know from you why you think it’s comparable to a human.”

“In what way isn’t it?”

Nick had begun to fold his arms over his chest. He likely knew he was coming off as rather huffy, but no one could truly control their emotions all of the time. If Shayne was answering the question, that would be just one part of his long bullet list to argue. He pursed his lips instead, looking down at the papers stuck to his clipboard.

“He’s warm when you touch him. He has my husband’s voice. He has his eyes and he has laugh, and everything about him is there! He’s so intelligent, he has his memories, he – Shayne, you’re the one who helped do this. Why don’t you think he’s human?”

The psychologist just closed his eyes, running the hand holding his pen still through his mop of blond hair. Truth be told he didn’t look his best, and he hadn’t even tried for a while. There was days old facial hair making him look even rougher when combined with his untrimmed hair, but as someone in a ‘soft science’ as Nick had put it, he was allowed a bit of leeway.

The job he had required emotion after all, in order to create them for artificial intelligence.

“There is something about humans. We will never, ever replicate them. You can be swayed with the charms, the looks, the actions, but it… it does what it’s programmed to do. If you asked it to hurt you, or to hurt someone else, it wouldn’t do it. It doesn’t have that same freedom. That’s not because we’re holding back, it’s not from some old rules a dead guy wrote ages ago, but we cannot replicate what most call free will.”

Nick shifted down into the couch as he listened, trying to scan his mind of memories to counteract in argument. A few already had come to mind.

“It’s not morally good, and it’s not morally bad or evil. It just exists in this stasis, like a purgatory on earth. That’s how they walk around, and you can tell. Not because they don’t look just as we do, or act just like us humans, but because they lack souls.”

In hindsight he should have anticipated that this bold statement would make Nick laugh. Nick leaned entirely back in his seat even, rolling his head back to rest as he let out strained laugh.

“Oh man… so what you’re saying…”

“You can call it what you want. I’m not religious but it’s one of the easier concepts to grasp, even if that’s not what the phenomenon is called. That it’s not human because it can’t be. That thing was manufactured in a lab.”

“Mostly manufactured by people like you and me!”

Nick was grinning ear to ear, unable to believe what he was hearing. He placed both hands on his own face, shaking his head back and forth.

“Creating humans is my job, my actual career. Maybe I took that break after all this happened, but listen, I splice and split and sew things together to create new humans. Are those fake, too?”

After his retort, Nick sat up again, this time his hands clenching the arm of the chair. He leaned over, just slightly, enough to seem as if he was being threatening.

At least he wasn’t trying to be intimidating. The look in his eyes was a bit crazed out of the passion he felt when he spoke.

“All of this science of healing people even before they’re born by deleting genes so they’re healthy – are you telling me I’m deleting their souls? Is there a genetic marker for the soul I should be aware of?”

“You use real humans all the way, Nick. From start to finish, it’s created and grown. For your so-called ‘husband’, it’s not the case. He even legally can’t be a human; it’s not just ethics and morals. He lacks being a biological organism through and through. Which is precisely why your husband was labeled dead and you can’t get a marriage license with an android.”

“People get cybernetic advancements, whether they need them or not. Maybe it’s to replace a bone in their arm or it’s better eyes, but those are robotic parts. They’re still human.”

Shayne had an immediate comeback.

“They were birthed, and legally, it’s defined that those parts are not human. Are you really trying to say that a bunch of metal and wires can be human? You know how it was created. If you tried to take the DNA of yourself and the DNA of this thing, combine it with whatever else you needed, it wouldn’t be enough of ‘him’ to make another human.”

The comment stung and caused Nick to narrow his eyes. 

“I poured my entire life into getting where I am now, into doing what I’ve done. Most of what I accomplished was because of Damien being right next to me. You can’t take that away, and neither can anybody. There is no ‘God’ that would have let this happen.”

The denial was evident. Nick didn’t want to have this conversation. He refused to as well, especially with Shayne of all people. He stood up and stormed out, ready to head back to his home where he knew he could escape the rest of the world.

____________________________________________________________

Damien admitted to being almost too nervous to propose, multiple times. It was as if it was his favorite story to tell.

He would tell their friends, mainly made of one another’s coworkers and assorted people they had picked up along the way, that if he knew who Nick was or what he did then he wouldn’t have ever spoken to him in the first place. He would have been star struck, even though he didn’t fully understand what it was that Nick did daily.

It still remains an uncommon thing for a scientist to have a famous face. Nick being good looking just helped propel him to some mild stardom, a poster child example of how brilliant people’s children could be.

They had met at a hotel bar, and Damien had gone up to him and asked him a trivia question about the longest river in Europe. Nick loved to travel, so very much, but he hadn’t in so long at that point. Ignoring strangers was his usual style, but when it came to being asked something out of the blue he had just answered out of shock — and just from being knowledgeable.

It hadn’t been because Damien promised to buy him a drink if he got it right. That part hadn’t stuck out to him until the brunet was pointedly insisting to know what he liked to drink since they succeeded.

The story of how they met was linked to how they were engaged, of course, and later on to how they even married. They dated and Damien had forced him out and away to take a trip, around the Volga river in Russia and across beautiful anciently old cities in northern Europe. It was like an old fairytale, being around all these places lost to time and untouched except for curious travelers like themselves. Before they could get too overwhelmed, they would finally reach what was once called Alsace-Lorraine. 

Nick was enthralled with the way his lover spoke German to guide them through a lot of areas, learning only then that he had been born on a military installation. Such curious then that he hadn’t continued that line of work, and even more curious they had left to come back to the US, but he was glad. The fact he did was why they were able to meet, after all.

It was an absolutely beautiful two weeks and had been as passionate as their initial courtship had been. For their year anniversary, Damien had woken him up with sensually growling compliments with lips pressed against his skin. Though he still had no idea what was being said, he loved anything Damien had to say.

This all was a passing part of the story Damien would tell, too. He would start to touch Nick’s shoulder, his lower back, maybe playfully swat his hand across his thigh to humbly brag and tease as if it were the language itself that was a kink for him. 

He had provided such warmth and love that Nick had needed for so long, that he felt as if he was the nervous one when Damien proposed.

He never got to add that on to Damien’s stories, because he would just listen and feel like the trophy that Damien made it sound like he was.

The actual proposal had been in a museum, between two wings. One hall was about the not so distant past, going further back the further you went, until it eventually would meet with the next about all the advancements and musings about what the future could have in store.

It was symbolic, but it was also Damien’s thoughtfulness towards the fact there was a photo plaque of Nicholas Uhas and scrolling text about the advancements the bright scientist was making in leaps and bounds.

Damien would always take the moment to let their brown eyes meet even in a crowd of friends, to give a beaming smile and say he wanted to be a part of that future so badly he was willing to go from Damien Haas to Damien Uhas if he had to. Not that a name was a great sacrifice when they were that similar, he would then segue into in order to address others again and make them laugh. 

Damien’s best friend from his college years would usually be around him at the time, because they always were nearly connected at the hip despite the different paths they took. He had been the reason why Damien had been around the hotel they had met at, since he tagged along for the adventure while his friend attended a scientific conference. It was very possible Damien and Nick could have never met, despite the latter and the best friend being coworkers.

The friend, Shayne, would playfully roll his eyes and comment what a sap Damien was, while his young boyfriend would give a warm look to the husbands with a small polite smile.

His best friend had come from a fractured home and couldn’t understand why Damien wanted to be married and eventually a family man. Shayne had older brothers from his father’s prior marriage, before he came along. He knew it was always up to individuals though; it was a personal thing considering he did see why the fact Damien had a much older sister would make him want to know what it was like. Being an uncle at a young age must have instilled something in him.

The thing was that the German-American was never quiet about these ideals he had. Nick had just brushed them off initially, until they had tied the knot and until their lives were sealed on paper. 

That was all it took for Nick to become engrossed in the conversations as well. 

Nick’s sister, only a bit older than he, had shown interest and offered to carry a child for them as a surrogate. She knew they would give her and the fetus the best care, and then continue to care lovingly for the child. This was something she and Damien apparently talked about, even without Nick always being aware. 

It mystified him how well Damien was loved by his family, but it had helped put him at ease that while Damien could be proactive, that he was sensible enough to be realistic. If his own family liked him, after all, that had to be the case.

With his husband in love with the idea of a family to complete them, Nick finally came around. Once he was all in, he knew he could be the one to go the extra mile. He began to feel like he finally understood the things Damien did on the rare chances they’d see a child while out together. Rather than the component of risk to his sister, he had begun to formulate a plan.

There were ways to take the genetics of two females and create a new child, a process that was becoming more commonplace. Anywhere that healthy genes could be had, they would take the opportunity. Nick had never even really thought or considered it before, but he would find himself diving right in the deep end. He was already a master at ‘deleting’ illness, and now he wanted to become a creator instead — and why not start with a human being, one with the intermingled DNA of himself and his husband.

If only Damien had known the strain it would bring.

It would be just the start of treating the warm hearted brunet as an experiment. There was just so much to be done after all, so many vials of blood or tissue samples to take and so many scans of every kind. The idea had seemed a bit excessive at first to him even, but when Nick had first mused it…. 

The way Nick had lit up was indescribable. The days Nick didn’t stay late at the lab and would be home to have dinner with his husband were some of their best days. He hardly understood any of the technical talk, but after a day of being used as a pincushion it was a blessing to listen about the science Nick was passionate for, and the sort of traits their child could have.

He was blinded with love, just before it seemed Nick was blind to him.

____________________________________________________________

His love was always home waiting for him.

From the moment that he walked in the door, it was the same as it had been since he had Damien back at home with him. He closed the door behind him and reset the home security system, and by the time that he was in the living room Damien was smiling widely and staring over at him.

“Welcome home. It’s late, did you need me to make you dinner?”

Nick went to set down his briefcase, but Damien took it from him. He held on to it while still smiling like a puppy, way too happy just for the situation at hand.

Sometimes it seemed that way. His emotions would be a bit too dialed up — but Nick just let it slide. It was nice in a way, after all.

“I ate before coming home.”

“Do you need help with anything? Want me to turn the shower on for you?”

“It’s sweet you’re the last person to do that manually, very sweet. Just make sure it’s scheduled for the morning like always.”

Although the scientist wasn’t smiling himself, it made him genuinely happy when Damien leaned in and kissed the corner of his lips. He patted Damien’s face as he pulled away.

“Are you just going to go to bed?”

It almost sounded as if this creature, the supposed half machine, that it felt concern and longing. The conversation with Dr. Topp had weighed on him, as much as he didn’t want to admit it. It wasn’t as if he believed the things Shayne had been spouting, but he couldn’t share the thoughts with Damien exactly either.

“Had a long day…” That saddened look persisted in his eyes, but the smile stayed on his lips. It seemed as if his hands even wanted to reach out and touch him. “…Did you maybe want to come and tell me how yours was, though?”

“Sure! If it’s not a problem, that is.” He seemed almost bashful for the excited reply. “Want to sit on the couch? You can lay on my lap.”

It was irrational, but the one thing Nick had remained always so hesitant about was the inclusion of Damien (how he was now, anyway) in bed. Since the death it had been Nick’s bed… the bed that had seen far too many tearful nights and emotions.

On the other hand, he just felt so vulnerable lately.

“Actually, I’m sorry, I think I want to go to bed actually after all. But since I did just promise you, maybe you can just sit on the bed and talk. For a little bit, at least."

There was no hesitation.

“If that’s what you want.”

It really did sound like it was a mutual desire. A mutual desire that made his heart flutter even, since he didn’t like always being alone in bed these days. He didn’t like trying to psychoanalyze every thing Damien said or did either, but he knew he was letting Shayne get to his head.

It was just that inviting Damien seemed like the wrong thing to do somehow. That wasn’t about to stop him, though. He smiled to let the other man know it was what he wanted, trailing a hand across his arm and back as he instead headed to the bedroom. 

Everything he passed in the house was sleek and spotless, just as he liked it. Damien made for a lovely house husband, considering he was far too worried to let him go out into the world alone. 

When he ended up in the bedroom, their bedroom, his bedroom — whatever it was, he started to strip down to his boxers. It was easy enough to find his sleeping pants to slide them on, because Damien had left them laid out on the bed for him.

By the time he actually had crawled in to bed and gotten under the covers, he realized the other was just watching him in the door frame. The house behind him was darkened now, except the slightest lights emanating from electronics, stuck and unable to be turned off without permanent shutdown. 

“You don’t sleep in all your clothes, so why are you still in them?”

He patted the side of the bed that was empty, watching a crooked and beautiful smile grow on Damien’s lips. 

His husband would fold his own clothes before putting them in the hamper, but it wasn’t quite as ritualistic as he used to be about it. It was like a left over remnant, and he was probably uncertain about if it was abnormal or not, but it was better not to address it. 

Pre-death, Damien — the Damien that had been born from another flesh and blood human, that Damien — had a brain wracked with OCD, leading him to be meticulously neat with sometimes overwhelming bouts of anxiety surrounding it. It was impossible to duplicate him down to the last cell, and Nick wasn’t sure why this happened, but something that didn’t end up duplicated meant he ended up losing much of his anxieties post-death.

The important part wasn’t musing about it though, it was once again feeling the weight of Damien crawling in to bed beside him. Immediately, he latched on to Nick, holding on to his shoulder until Nick obliged and crawled in to the crook of his arm.

It was nice to be held and feel that intimacy.

“I spent part of the day looking up just how to make some nice wooden bowls. The right kind of wood, how to stain it, all the tools, everything. It’d really be a neat skill.”

Nick laid his head back, emitting the lowest of groans.

“I know you don’t want me to work with that stuff… You don’t want me to get hurt. You told me that, and I love you, I respect you, but sometimes I think that’s a bit silly.”

“Turn the lights off, please.”

Damien reached over him to grasp at his bedside, messing with a small panel resting against the night stand that matched the one on his own side. In just a moment’s time, the lights dimmed before turning off entirely, and Damien returned to hold him again.

“People lose their fingers, their hands even, doing stuff like that.”

“Sorry.”

He murmured just slightly and enveloped Nick in his arms. It was as if he was worried and frightened he wouldn’t get to hold him all night like this again, so he tolerated every bit of shifting and adjusting that he did to feel more comfortable.

Because of this concern, instead of what was on his mind, he made idle chatter and comments to try and just keep speaking until Nick was actually falling asleep.

The comfort and love that Nick felt was beyond anything he felt anyone could every create.

Undoubtedly, he loved him still. He always had, and he always would.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Damien shouldn't remember what he does.
> 
> He also doesn't remember things a normal human would never forget, but nobody even told him.

“You don't need those.”

When Nick woke up, he had blinked through bleary vision just to see Damien was already awake — and had been handling a pair of glasses. He had been inspecting them like they were a foreign object to him, and had been close to putting them on. 

A book was also open at Damien’s lap, and the bedside drawer next to him was ajar. It’s where he had found the glasses and Nick reached over to gingerly take them from him. 

With the glasses being removed from his grip, he looked at his husband and smiled curiously.

“I don’t? I don’t remember having eye surgery. That doesn’t just go away.”

He was insisting and yet there was a playful tone to it. Damien reached to grab Nick’s hands, encapsulate them as they held the glasses. Damien’s hands had always been a bit smaller, thinner than Nick’s own, but they now seemed almost larger.

“You don’t need them. Your vision is perfect.”

“Not from what I remember.”

This couldn’t turn into an argument. It would just be like arguing to a wall, except a wall was probably not aware of its existence. Probably…

So instead, as he sat up he leaned in and rested his forehead against Damien’s. It seemed like the younger man curled in toward him, noticing or picking up on the need for more affection. 

He looked into Nick’s eyes at the same time, and Nick just stared in the honey-brown color eyes. They focused so intently on him, and he wasn’t about to relent and look away. The eyes were looking as warm as they ever had, but something about the pupils made him anxious.

When Damien seemed to note the uneasiness and pulled his hands away to embrace Nick instead, Nick let the glasses fall between them and suddenly grabbed his face. 

“Babe?”

He tilted his head. Everything was perfect about him. He felt warm, even. The look in his eyes was so human and empathetic that there was no way it wasn’t exactly that — a human look. 

“You are the vision, Damien. You’re the vision of the future and you are perfect.” 

That goofy grin was the same that it always had been. He was perfect to every last minuet detail, and Nick could admit to loving him just as same as he always had. Maybe he had been healed of some flaws he once had, but it meant he now was even more perfect.

“I’m not… well, not entirely sure I know what you mean.” 

The inflection in his voice was positively inquisitive, but there was no answer that would be appropriate. Nick could stroke what was beneath his fingertips and relish the feel of flesh, but the knowledge it was manufactured and artificial boggled his mind if he thought about it. There was warm, pulsing blood in the skin after all. He wasn’t wires and gears.

So he was studying Damien’s face when instead, the other leaned in to kiss him. 

This was something that the old Damien would have done. He’d make him feel in love by providing stability and comfort, and seal the deal with a kiss each time. Even in the scientific field, not everything in his life had been so certain all the time — but Damien could make him feel safe.

It was the first time in a while that Nick allowed something like an unsolicited kiss to happen. 

His breath hitched in his throat as he participated in the kiss. The intimacy he felt, it just had to be mutual. When he pulled away from the kiss, he simply smiled. 

“Thank you for that.”

Nick cleared his throat and picked up the glasses again, setting them on his own bedside table. He let his legs dangle over the side of the bed, sighing softly before he got up. It was strange that all of a sudden the sour and fluctuating moods he had been going through the past few weeks — enough to warrant the attention of his employers — seemed silly. It was ridiculous. 

The way he had grown to be short with others, being intolerant of even reasonable questions or things asked of him. The fact he would have near daily breakdowns, if only for brief moments, visibly flustered and his brain in a tailspin downward. Even the way he had tightened the grip on his control of his husband — it was abnormal to have lashed out, considering nothing had changed recently.

All he had needed maybe was to let his vulnerabilities back down.

Now, even without being awake for very long, he worried about what to do the next time he was mandated to speak with Shayne. It was even possible he could get in some sort of trouble for having stormed out on him. 

That was another thing he had troubles with lately — being impulsive, not really thinking through about any future consequences.

He made his way to the bathroom to get ready for the day. At least he now had not only a renewed faith in himself, but that everything he did had always been the right thing.

____________________________________________________________

 

It was two days later when he was mandated to speak with Shayne again. 

Though the not always so kindly doctor had tried to convince those above him that perhaps he wasn’t the best fit to deal with someone’s grudges, especially when one of the grudges seemed aimed at him, he had ended up entirely unsuccessful. Just as unsuccessful in fact, as his talks with Nick. There hadn’t even been any pushback against the fact Nick had left the first time.

So with the fact that he considered it a bust every single time Nick came in and sat down, he stopped even asking Nick to talk. As long as he wrote down something on paper that made it seem like he wasn’t having any breakthrough, but that Nick was steady, and as long as his actual reactions fit that (no ‘flying off the handle’ for instance, or random spurts of inappropriate tears) then he felt like he was getting away with it.

As it slowly stretched into a week, then two, Nick became comfortable with the prospect of just sitting and hanging out in Shayne’s office. He would bring in some of his work, and while he was asked what it was, he could just give a half hearted reply and lay out some incredibly technical terms that made Shayne’s eyes gloss over. 

The intended goal was to gain back some sort of control over the lead scientist, the bright mind that had made so many incredible medical advancements that society needed to survive. Maybe Shayne wasn’t the one who had a direct hand in that, but he was glad that Nick was just as happy to be hush-hush as he was that they weren’t really talking — as long, of course, as his attitude reflected positive changes.

It was almost three weeks after their first meeting (first fight, more aptly) that Shayne even bothered trying to investigate why the change.

“I don’t even see a reason you need to keep coming in. You seem fine.”

This was the first thing he said to Nick when the other walked in the door. It made him pause and stare at Shayne strangely, before he took a seat anyway while placing the latest work he had smuggled away to do on his lap. 

“Just had a rough patch, I guess. Just because I have Damien back, I thought everything would be fine, but well… I still had some things to work on.”

The mention of Damien made Shayne tense up, his lips in a thin line that was stretched into a frown. He hated speaking to Nick, and that was precisely why. Perhaps he’d already made a mistake that would open the floodgates, so to say.

“I was kind of stupid. You know, we hadn’t really… slept in the same room since… Since what happened. But now, everything’s fine.”

“I’d say this is great news, but there’s really no telling if you’re just going to dive off the deep end again. Just, now it would look bad on me if you did.”

Nick ran his fingers against the papers he held, his thumb flipping through them. He still spoke, even though he seemed preoccupied. There was no way he actually was reading anything he went through, but his mind just didn’t seem to be focused.

“Things are back the way they should be. Since you made such a big deal about it before, we’ve even been intimate again. Well, not because you had said that, not at all, but because it just happened.”

He tripped over his own words, unsure how to get them across. He could have carefully crafted a way to humbly brag about the situation, but it went beyond that now. He wouldn’t even give a glance back up to Shayne out of feeling that the other man was judging him.

“Well, that’s… Nice.”

Shayne cleared his throat, judging himself rather than Nick. He played with the pen in his hand, passing it along each of his knuckles. Luckily for him, it wasn’t like the brunet exactly wanted to share details. 

“Part of me was still just a bit afraid to get close to him again. Now that I’ve closed that gap… we finally are just back to how things really were. He’s the nicest guy, and he always has been. Now, more than ever, he’s also just… perfect.”

He didn’t feel like getting into a fight this time. He’d just take this at face value, recount down Nick’s own tales in his paper, and try to suggest that any counseling he was supposed to have was done and over with. If he could close out seeing Nick, make sure everything was squared away, then anything else if he broke down would be on his own responsibility. There’d be nothing tying them together.

It wasn’t as if he felt good about it, but he did just want to wash his hands of it.

The longer he thought about it lately, he wanted to wash his hands of so many things. Once his contract was done, the ultimate thing he could do would be leave everything behind and go, off to the other coast or something. Find work that didn’t require him being in this same high security complex all the time, with all the memories it held.

“So you’re done with your… depressive state, we’ll call it? You’re finished with all the messy lifestyle things spilling over into work?”

“It’s not like that was my intention in the first place.”

“I understand that, but what I need to know is if it’s all over.”

Nick pursed his lips together, nodding his head yes. He held on to the clipboard that held his papers so tightly, his knuckles changing to a whitish color from the sheer pressure.

“You don’t like me in here taking up space, up in your hair while you can be working on so many other things. I get that. But yeah, I think I’m fine now. Like I said, I never intended to, what, have human emotions, or whatever my crime here is. I’m fine now and feel pretty good, actually. Which is especially how I know I don’t need to deal with this line of questioning.”

“Great. That’s more power to you, then. We can go ahead and get the ball in motion for not having to keep doing this every few days, as if anything is actually happening in here. You solved it all on your own.”

He had to bite his tongue to not punctuate his sentence by scathingly referring to the other as a genius. He may have gone for that extra push if Nick seemed particularly smug, but, he didn’t — so perhaps this could end now.

The scientist did take a stand again, less than ten minutes after sitting. He felt riled up, but just slightly. He could get an early lunch now today instead, he figured, so there was no major loss in the fact Shayne had the audacity to speak to him.

He left the room without another word, and started his way down long, windowless, sterile looking halls.

Even his shoes on the laminate flooring sounded loud. He sped up as if he had a purpose to be walking, though, and that purpose was to both get away from Shayne and to finish lunch and go back to the lab as soon as possible. The project he was working on now, the deadline was on the horizon. In the back of his mind he wondered if Doctor Topp would get some of the praise that belonged to him, all for seemingly whipping him back into shape.

Nevertheless, he would persist.

The psychologist’s office wasn’t the closest to the cafeteria. No, the cafeteria was closer to the living dormitories, the room on-site that let students and staff live right here. The entire complex was so large, and Nick hated eating there, but at times it was just much easier than the process of leaving and coming back in. He’d left his lunch at home anyway, having not even wanted to leave the bed with his husband and then having to rush to bathe and dress just to leave.

For no reason at all, he decided to change his mind and to change the path he was on.

Instead of toward the cafeteria, he headed over toward the labs again. A regular person would need to calm down, but he felt as if he was the type who needed instead to focus the jittery energy he had on the work he did. He’d grab lunch later, or better yet, ask someone else to bring him something back instead. 

He loved his job, he really did. He was well good and fine with the fact he was playing as God, and it had brought him no consequences that he could think of. The past few days he was working on a deadline that required so much repetitive research and feedback, and while he could delegate those beneath him to the grunt work, he liked to make sure it all looked fine.

He had started out with people’s health, making sure people who weren’t even born yet would be born at peak health. There still existed people with imperfections, whether with their mental health or physical form, but they existed long before his work even took place. Every experience he had in life comforted him that he was doing the right things — after all, it hit him pretty personally. 

After all, though it was through mistake, nothing quite made Nick as happy to know that Damien was now healthy. The flaws that once haunted him were gone forever.

All of this, he had no issues with. In this day and age, no one could get mad at the prospect of health, as long as the children being born were able to survive in the first place. Recently, though, and he felt this may have been his cause to feel a bit depressed, but there was quite a bit going on in the ways of ‘designer’ children. 

After all, if you could choose, then why not?

It seemed silly to him and quite bluntly, a waste of resources.

It just required so much paperwork to back it, just as everything he did required. Luckily, it was actually quite easier to pull off.

He worked through his intended early lunch, and then through his actual lunch as well. 

Paper after paper just started blurring together, and that was when he asked someone to grab him a coffee while he went to go wash his face.

His limbs felt so stiff as he walked to the restroom. He made sure to roll his wrists in small exercises, so he could feel less stiff when he got back to work. It felt especially nice to be splashing his face with cold water, and he took the time to just really stop and breathe.

So of course now would be when he felt a hand clamp on his shoulder, one that made him jump just slightly. He used the mirror to look, and notice that Shayne was next to him and staring down at him. The faucet’s automated timer shut itself off, and when Nick reached for a napkin, Shayne instead grabbed one for him and shoved it in his hand.

“You need to come with me.”

Nick rubbed his face dry, completely confused.

“Let me just tell them at the lab that I—“

“No. Now.”

He crumpled the napkin in his hand, throwing it away before Shayne jerkingly pulled him along. Nick jumped back slightly, trying to get out of the man’s grip. 

This wasn’t like Shayne. 

He seemed genuinely angry.

There was comfort in the fact that he knew his way around the building though, meaning he would know where Shayne was taking him. They headed back towards the offices, before taking the sharp turn toward the other wing of the building.

Nick didn’t feel like asking why, or even asking what they were doing. It may have been a long road to get there, but at least it didn’t seem like Shayne was dragging him out to the wolves in charge or anything.

They eventually were in sight of the hall branch that would lead folks from the entrance security measures and dump them in to the catacomb-like facility within. 

Down the long, empty hall, he first saw a small group of 3 congregated just in the middle. He noted two of them immediately as his colleagues, causing him to tense. Though his back was turned away from them, the visitor’s lanyard around the third’s neck gave enough of a clue to Nick as to who it was and why Shayne would drag him all the way here. 

Shayne made sure they both stopped, and Nick sighed softly. While Shayne just seemed intent on staring him down, as if looks could kill, it only drew Nick’s gaze away. 

It was when he heard the unmistakeable sound of a young child babbling that Nick’s eyes widened. He could suddenly feel the blood rushing to his face, and he felt like throwing up even before he saw his husband shift enough to expose the fact he was holding a young girl.

“You’re doing so much better, that you can’t even prevent something as stupid as this?”

Shayne hissed quietly, his words stinging Nick as if they were venom. 

“I don’t… I don’t know why he’s…” He felt lightheaded, his vision going blurry even as he stared at the group. Shayne shook both of his arms, and Nick knew all the anger was justified. This was now officially out of control, worse than he had been weeks ago.

“Oh fuck, Shayne, look, I don’t have anything to do with this.” 

He whispered, casting a fearful glance to the floor instead. 

“Get yourself together so you can fix this.”

He felt nails digging into his arms, and his breath hitched as he inhaled. He shook his head before he began to nod, shutting his eyes tightly. He needed to take control of the situation, and fast.

“This is wrong, Nick.”

“I know.”

He tore himself away from Shayne again and quickly speed-walked to them, his actions stiff and frightened. He addressed his colleagues directly, ignoring his husband momentarily, even as he stood right beside him.

“My apologies, he was just leaving. I assume this was some kind of mistake.”

The male of the two was visibly shaken, the look he gave Nick not one of anger like Shayne, but one of complete disbelief. Although Nick heard Damien immediately speak and perk up realizing he was there, greeting him happily, he didn’t turn his head or acknowledge him back.

“You have no idea what kind of mistake this is, Mr. Uhas.”

“I’m sure I’ll find out.”

He responded to the female, turning his head to watch as Damien handed back over the little girl. He kept his face neutral, because everything inside of him didn’t know how to respond to watching her yawn and smile. Looking between her honey brown eyes and dark hair, and then looking to Damien, he just felt numb.

“She’s very well behaved for a two year old! Just a bit too sleepy, huh? Sorry if… if I did something.”

Damien looked around at everyone, now, noting with confusion that Shayne was there now too. He kept a concerned smile on his face, wanting to keep his usual friendly demeanor even if he now felt maybe something was wrong. After all, the parents hadn’t seemed angry that he held their daughter. She had bumped into him, and he had just been trying to do the friendly thing. 

There hadn’t even seemed to be an issue until Nick had shown up and spoken.

“You didn’t know better, Damien.” Nick said, though the tone seemed as if he was trying to reassure himself more than anything. “Do you see that door, right over there? There’s a small lounge in there. Please go and have a seat, I’ll join you in a minute.”

“Uh, should I… What…” He was visibly confused now, even glancing back to Shayne. That made him even less comfortable than his confusion, so instead, he placed an arm on Nick’s shoulder for reassurance. “Okay. I’ll wait for you.”

But there was one last thing, because there was always one last thing.

As he walked away, he mentioned to the ‘parents’ that they were lucky to have such a cute little kid.

Nick closed his eyes tightly, standing steadfast in his place. He could hear the door of the lounge open, and also the door close, but most of all it was like he could hear his heart racing in his own chest.

As the ‘father’ walked towards Shayne with the girl, Nick knew there were going to be more heated words as the supervisor of the toddler’s well-being stood in front of him demanding answers. Anything she was going to ask, he knew she was in her right to — but he also wanted to preemptively give his side of the story.

“I don’t know why he’s here, or who let him in, but this is just one big mistake. He doesn’t know who she is. He died before I could even tell him there was a success and we were even ready to move on with the artificial incubation process.”

He didn’t have the heart in him to look back to Shayne. The pompous ass was probably having a field day already, pretending to be upset just so he’d be able to gloat about how fucked up things were. 

He also couldn’t fathom having to talk with Damien, trying to find some way to brush everything off.

“I know it looks really bad, but I promise, I know for a fact Damien has no idea she’s his daughter.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm adding chapters as I finish the next chapters in line, lolz. these are turning out longer than expected.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I think that’s a lot of blood. It’s been the most blood I think in the past few weeks.”
> 
> It was that phrase that got his attention as he discarded the needle and grabbed a pen to begin marking the vials.
> 
> “I shouldn’t need anything else from you next week, though. You’ll be able to get some rest and relax.”
> 
> “What about you? Are you going to ‘rest and relax’ too?”
> 
> / / 
> 
> In the past, Damien had some problems with feeling like he didn't belong. In a way, he was mostly right - he didn't belong.

“Are you going to be busy after this? Do you want to eat lunch together?”

Damien couldn’t help but stare at his own arm as he asked. The fact his husband was currently drawing some of his blood had him glued to watching what was going on. He was startlingly used to it now, and the familiarity of it made him grateful — if not a bit tired. It was far better than at the start, the way Nick used to have a way of bruising his arms up every single time when he drew blood.

He watched as Nick placed a swab of cotton on top of the needle where it pierced into his skin, and then withdraw the needle. He didn’t even flinch, but he sure did have a feeling the answer he would get about lunch wouldn’t be very good.

Nick held down the swab until Damien lifted his arm and pressed it into the crease of his own elbow. 

“I think that’s a lot of blood. It’s been the most blood I think in the past few weeks.”

It was that phrase that got his attention as he discarded the needle and grabbed a pen to begin marking the vials.

“I shouldn’t need anything else from you next week, though. You’ll be able to get some rest and relax.”

“What about you? Are you going to ‘rest and relax’ too?”

Nick was already hurrying around the lab, seemingly already switched to being only half-focused on what was going on as far as conversation was involved. He gave a half grin as he shook his head, denying Damien’s hopes.

“The entire point was to let you have some rest for once. This is my job, anyway.”

When he pulled the cotton swab away from his arm, he swiped it back just to dab at a bit of blood that still bubbled up. He didn’t want to give off the obvious, which was he felt rather rejected by this kind of response.

“When are we going to be able to spend some time together?”

He was handed a roll of tape, and he tore off a piece so he could adhere the cotton ball to his elbow. 

“Well…”

Before he could answer, he was cut off.

“I can’t do lunch with you, no. Not today, there’s so many things still. Maybe you could ask Shayne if he could join you.”

Unbeknownst to him, Damien had already tried asking his friend when they ran into one another earlier. He, too, was busy, busy beyond belief with things that everyone told him he couldn’t quite comprehend. It left him a bit disappointed, really, as if his choice of skilled work with his hands wasn’t even necessary, like their medical paths were.

“I’ll ask him… You do still have to eat, you know.”

“Could you just bring me something back?”

“Sure.”

Just with that, it felt as if he had been dismissed. He stood up from his seat, gripping his arm as he went along to had to the door. He had become far too acquainted with everything in the facility for his own liking, but it was increasingly becoming the only way to spend any time with his husband.

When he was out in the hallway and making his way across corridors, every person that he passed made him feel even further alienated. This was a place full of scientists, doctors, students, people who poured their lives into their work. Although he was on friendly terms with now what seemed like many of them, he couldn’t relate to them or their lives in any way. 

Today, for once, he was glad he managed to avoid conversations as he walked. He was lucky enough to avoid them as he headed inside the cafeteria area and grabbed a mixed greens salad as well as a nutrient drink, too. Perhaps it was owed to the fact that he wasn’t looking at every single person, scanning their faces like he was a puppy dog looking for a new owner, thus leading to less pity since he seemed to be wandering aimless. 

He paid for his food and decided he’d eat it in the outdoorsy area, a spot meant to replicate a small sized garden with a few wrought iron tables and chairs from the old world interspersed between greenery and on top of cobblestone.

The forced sterile feeling, even in this area meant to replicate outdoors, managed to bother him once he opened the glass doors that led out to it. It felt like the air was stiff, as if it wasn’t ventilated very well. Though it must have always been this exact same way, it bothered him now. Damien made a beeline to a spot where he knew he could sit and watch a small water installment.

It was the same water circulating endlessly, just a small fountain disguised as a small waterfall. 

He hoped it would be relaxing to watch and hear the water fall and swirl.

Owing to his antisocial behavior of the day, he hadn’t noticed that not long behind him, since leaving the cafeteria with his food, had been his best friend’s lover. He hadn’t even been able to take a bite of his food before he noticed the tall, lanky, and young student saunter in. 

From his face he tried to hold back a grimace. It left him with a forced smile instead as the young man sat directly across from him, despite all the seating around them being quite available. 

“Hey.”

Noah sat down a plate with pasta on it as he casually spoke first.

“Hi. It’s been a while since we last saw one another, hasn’t it?”

He thought he could nip things in the bud if he just pushed onward. After all, there was no reasonable excuse to leave, since he hadn’t even started to eat. It would be rude to lie, as well, even though he didn’t really want company to his growing sadness.

“I think it was… some… function. You know. One of those functions. I don’t really know what in specific.”

Noah laughed, giving him a rather affable air right off the bat. Damien watched as the other went ahead and began to eat.

“But you are right, it’s been some time! How are you?”

“I’m hanging in there. You?”

His voice must have sounded strained, but Noah just took note of it for the time being instead of pushing it.

“I’m mad at your friend.”

He sure wasn’t expecting to hear something like that.

“He’s working too much lately on his latest, greatest thing. I know that they really want to push this advancement through, but they could let him rest a day or so, right?”

“Ah, well, Shayne likes what he does! If he’s working on it, why aren’t you?”

It didn’t mean to be insulting, but he could tell immediately Noah looked rather soured. It just turned to confusion, his dark eyebrows pushed together as the corners of his lips turned downward. A small puff of air escaped his lips before he spoke again.

“Pff, probably because my field is cognitive linguistics and the impact it has on psychological anthropology. A lot of that means analysis during different stages than what Shayne’s working on. We rarely work side by side.”

Damien smiled politely, but he couldn’t hold it in.

“I have no idea what you just said, except the last part.”

Noah looked humbled, bowing his head and shrugging his shoulder just slightly. Damien gave a small chuckle to himself, realizing he very likely wasn’t going to get an explanation. Especially not when he watched Noah raise his head just enough to lock their gaze together, asking a question with such open earnest.

“What do you do, Damien?”

“I’m… well, I’m a textile technician. It’s kinda scientific, but not nearly as much as ah, everything around here.”

“I’ve heard you speak German. Why?”

“Oh! Well… Uh. About that…”

“Sorry, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I just thought that’s pretty neat, when you won’t find it taught in any schools around here.” Noah paused for a moment after speaking, before he thoughtfully added another sentence. “Or in a lot of places. The process of transmission with it ended fairly quickly, with a pretty large scale linguicide and all…”

“I don’t know what you’re saying,” he murmured lightly. “My family had thought it was important that I know where I came from. It took a lot of books.”

“I’d love to hear you speak it sometime. Besides hearing more about… where you came from. You weren’t born here, were you? Makes sense. A lot of times it seems you’re being so open about how you feel just so you can hide who you are easier.”

The analysis stumped him. He shifted a bit in his seat, looking away as he became determined now to just eat and go. It felt very poignant that someone had been able to come up with that description, but it did also feel rather vouyeristic and wrong in a way.

“Plus, I think you said you weren’t once.”

“Hah… That makes a lot more sense.”

Noah clenched his fork tightly into his palm. It appeared as if he was bursting at the seams with the desire to say more, but so far everything had been so unpredictable about the conversation. It’d even been unpredictable for Noah himself, but there was a reason he felt compelled to continue talking.

“I’m making everything so weird when really, I just want to get to know you.”

He had to think about it a moment. In the time he had taken to pause and mull it over, it had only encouraged Noah to keep speaking.

“It’s hard to connect to people around here, which is just… It just feels wrong, you know? We’re all here together for one reason anyway, and that’s to connect people, right? In a way? Truth be told, Shayne kind of dragged me out here, and I haven’t connected with anyone else. I don’t even know why not. I want to try, but it’s like nobody else feels like an outsider too. Then I see you around and it’s like nobody else ever stopped evaluating who you are, what your role is here. I think I see that because I kinda feel the same. I’m not the genius here, Shayne is.”

It was rather painful to listen to this sort of analysis. It would make an incredible amount of sense to just push it away and state that he was reaching for a connection because of how he himself just admitted to feeling, but the idea that perhaps someone else shared in his misery was a seductive one.

“The last bit is… that’s too true. And now our lives are just consumed with everything going on. I’m here all the time, and I don’t belong.”

The younger man let go of the fork he had so tightly held, all so he could reach out and grab a hold of Damien’s hand. For some reason or other that he didn’t entirely comprehend, Damien didn’t pull back.

“We should get together some time.”

It sounded like a desperate plead. Damien however finally cracked, giving the other a shy smile.

“Yeah. Maybe we do have more to talk about.”

“For the longest time, only having Shayne as a companion did work, but… Maybe I just also need someone like you.”

____________________________________________________________

The thing Damien hadn’t expected was for it all to progress so quickly after that, or in the way that it did progress.

The very first time he went ahead and invited Noah to his home — to his and his husband’s home — they somehow ended up awkwardly kissing. It was more like they had both mashed their lips to meet one another at the same time, even though one of them logically had to be the one to act first. He couldn’t recall.

It was very, very fast after that.

He’d been the one to show Noah where the bedroom was. While on top of him, he had been the one to use his knee to nudge open the other man’s legs as his hands felt around just a bit too much. He didn’t even remember how he had responded to the one considerate question of if they should be doing it or not — but he sure did make sure to see it all to completion.

Later on in the night, quite late, he had slept beside Nick as if nothing had happened, too. He’d changed the bed sheets and with that, seemingly he wiped away his own guilt. 

At the very least, he wanted to feel bad. 

It had just felt cold laying beside his husband, and it had for a while. He couldn’t fool himself any longer, now that he knew he wasn’t the reason their previous ignited passion had flickered out. 

Now that things had gone so far, though, he knew he had to stay by as Nick completed his work. After all, Noah had expressed no desire to leave Shayne either, not the first time, and not many times after that. Shayne’s work on the latest artificial intelligence systems wouldn’t last forever, there would be an eventual return to normalcy. 

Their infidelity, Damien figured, would just be a blip on the radar before having a family would tie everything back together. For the meantime, it was just nice to know someone felt his same pain.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy shit I lost access to this chapter for 3 weeks, while I worked on writing other parts and continuing on, because my computer died and I had issued getting the part to repair it. I could have posted it yesterday but... forgot, with everything else going on. Nice. Anyhow, also have a serial killer fic thing I'm working on. 
> 
> Meanwhile, this is still my favorite thing ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _“You may have cost me my job.”_
> 
> _Nick could hardly concede to the fact that it wasn’t entirely Damien’s fault, that he really just had not known any better -- even though that was the defense he offered up to everyone else who was upset by his actions. Admitting to himself that it wasn’t Damien’s fault, meant admitting it was his own._
> 
> _Of course, that just created another situation Damien wasn’t aware of. In fact, he reached out and grabbed Nick’s hand, gently wrapping his fingers on top of it._
> 
> _The thing that Nick had fallen most in love with about him ended up becoming what he could no longer stand. He felt unworthy of the selfless, attentive way that Damien would care for him. It took a lot to not just jerk away from the touch._
> 
> / / /
> 
> Nick catches a lot of heat from his career, and Damien doesn't even know what he supposedly remembers. That revelation is just what's needed to turn Nick cold again.

“You’re mad at me.” 

It had been 2 days since Nick had spoken to him. Damien just felt hurt and confused by this -- he didn’t quite grasp what was going on. Now that he had found Nick sitting at their dining room table, he figured he would confront him. It wasn’t as if he’d been back to work since he had yelled at Damien in private, and he felt lost and kept in the dark about what was going on.

Nick’s hair was disheveled. He had dark circles under his eyes, and his usual five o’clock shadow had grown into something more. Looking pallid and stressed, all Damien could do was worry. He slid into a seat beside him, placing both of his hands on the table as he leaned forward a bit. He gripped his own fingers, nervously wringing them, trying to catch any emotions from Nick’s face as it was awash in the glow of the orange lighting emanating from the nearby shades of the floor to ceiling windows. 

Though the lighting may have been artificial, Damien could recognize whatever was on Nick’s mind was causing him some very real pain.

It was as if they weren’t even close to one another again. They had been reconnecting, but then all it took was one misstep on his part. The long, glasstop table with the white tile flooring for their dining room made everything feel as sterile as they were at the laboratory. All he wanted to do was reach out and hold him, but so far, Nick hadn’t even responded back. 

He was just staring at the table and refusing to look at his husband.

It frustrated Damien. What else was it supposed to do? If Nick wasn’t willing to talk to him, then there was no way they were going to be able to communicate what the issue was. It hadn’t helped just to be told he should have never come to his work, because for the life of him, Damien couldn’t figure out why he shouldn’t have done that.

“I know I messed up. But I made it all the way back home, and then you wouldn’t even talk to me about why. You just walked right past me, right to our room, and you slammed the door. You locked it, for Christ’s sake, Nick. You’ve never locked me out.” 

Nick closed his eyes. Damien just kept staring at him, a mixture of pity, confusion, and disgust.

“I would visit you all the time. If I wasn’t allowed to, I couldn’t have gotten the clearance to go back and see you. Why is there just something you aren’t telling me? Why won’t you tell me, still?” 

“You may have cost me my job.” 

Nick could hardly concede to the fact that it wasn’t entirely Damien’s fault, that he really just had not known any better -- even though that was the defense he offered up to everyone else who was upset by his actions. Admitting to himself that it wasn’t Damien’s fault, meant admitting it was his own.

Of course, that just created another situation Damien wasn’t aware of. In fact, he reached out and grabbed Nick’s hand, gently wrapping his fingers on top of it. 

The thing that Nick had fallen most in love with about him ended up becoming what he could no longer stand. He felt unworthy of the selfless, attentive way that Damien would care for him. It took a lot to not just jerk away from the touch.

“Is there anything I can do? Is there anyone I can talk to for you?”

“It doesn’t work that way.” 

“It’s not like they can spring this on you out of nowhere. They have to have a reason. Who is saying they’ll fire you? What exactly is the problem?”

“Nobody said they’d fire me. They just told me not to come back for now.”

His shoulders slumped when he said that. It was hard to keep everything together now, based off of how miserable he felt. He found himself soon enough just facedown against his other arm against the table, letting Damien still hold his hand.

“I think maybe there’s a way it can be salvaged still. Don’t you? You can’t just give up.”

Of course he spoke so hopefully about future prospects. Nick just had to take in a deep breath and shake his head.

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what’s going to happen.” 

“Look, whatever it is, I’ll be right here with you.”

When he lifted his head, Damien noted his red-rimmed eyes. He looked as if he was absolutely crushed, and seeing that made Damien take a stand. He closed the gap between both of them and enveloped the other man in his arms, resting his body against him in the seat. He closed his eyes and kissed the back of Nick’s head, taking both of his arms to cross them over his chest. 

He found the perfect spot to rest in the crook of Nick’s neck.

Nick felt so isolated thinking about the way he had been told off by his superiors. He was told they would be in contact, and then he was told to go home. Part of that was to expect some sort of disciplinary action, most likely.

He had been on thin ice already, but with Damien showing up it seemed to prove Nick had normalized the synth as a continuation of his dead husband. Any security credentials that Damien once had to visit were certainly stripped as well, since they hadn’t been after his demise apparently. For his entire life, he knew what he wanted to do. This had been his calling, and he had always done the most he could to prove himself -- so hearing nothing but such overwhelming negative feedback lately really had made him feel like he was pushed in the mud by older kids on the playground.

For just the briefest of moments he began to wonder what it would be like if he was on his own, again. Though Shayne was always so callous and cold these days, he still was revered in what he did and he got things done. Nobody ever questioned him, or his motives, or thought that he was no longer competent. 

He thought of the time he worked before he met Damien, the day in and day out grind without ever being sociable. He wouldn’t give anyone else the time of day, unless it was relevant to something being done. Nick had been incredibly guarded, and he had never felt like he was missing anything.

But the thought of going back to that immediately turned him off. After all, now that he already had his husband back, there was no going back to a time without him. The impact he had made in his life was beyond what Nick could imagine living without. He had found that he actually had been missing something, and now, he couldn’t let go.

The situation was two sides to the same coin, though. He was also nothing without his work, and that was the problem.

He had given so much of his life that now, they likely could work without him. Not that he would have an option of stepping back entirely -- his employer owned his life, basically, just as he felt the same toward the synth in his home.

Nick rested against him.

“If they take this away from me, I don’t know what I’ll do.”

He murmured softly.

‘This’ was all-encompassing and multi-faceted when he said it. After all, he hadn’t forgotten the fact that they owned his daughter. Losing what he had would very realistically mean losing her, forever.

He wasn’t ready for that. He already didn’t know her in the way that he should. All he could hope was that one day she would be able to come home, but it was quite customary that children spend the first few years under medical observation in the first place.

Trapped.

He felt trapped.

The arms around him tightly was like the proverbial noose tightening.

\------------

Nick’s sleep was always devoid of dreams.

He didn’t have nightmares, either, so that was a benefit. He would just close his eyes, and six hours later, continue on with life.

When he first opened his eyes, he shuffled around in the empty bed a bit. He clung tightly to the pillow, groaning as he curled around it. His eyes felt glued together when he tried to open them, and even when he did, he still couldn’t see through the blurry view ahead of him.

He could feel, however, the pressure of someone sitting on the edge of the bed near him. 

“What’s going on?”

There was no familiar scent of coffee being brewed. Everything around him just felt a bit off, once he finally began to actually process the waking world around him. He brought his fists to his eyes and he rubbed them, blinking and trying to see as he let go of the pillow and sat up. 

He frowned as he looked at Damien. He felt fatigued, from the moment he woke up, and when his eyes finally wanted to focus, he noticed that Damien was just staring down at the floor. 

The younger man looked stiff. He clenched his fingers into a fist which he held on top of his knees, and it looked as if he’d seen something that greatly disturbed him.

Noticing this, Nick scooted over towards him on the bed. This wasn’t like him to act like this - he grimaced himself, even, at the confusion of what could be bothering him.

Damien wouldn’t look at him.

It was only after Nick placed a hand on his shoulder and he reeled away from it, that he finally said something.

“I think I killed Noah.”

Nick’s jaw dropped. He felt his chest tighten, and he felt frozen in place.

This wasn’t right.

“I have to go.”

When Damien looked to him, it was like catching a deer in the headlights. He was confused at the reaction, because he would have expected any other reaction besides this. 

Feeling the honey brown eyes narrow their gaze on him, it made him suspect he would begin hyperventilating instead.

He threw the blankets behind him and still nearly tripped getting out of bed. He’d never been so quick to in his life. Bolting for the door and leaving his confused partner behind, he struggled to think what he was supposed to do next.

He made it half across the house towards the door before he doubled back again, grabbing a phone off it’s receiver where it was mounted near the kitchen. When he hurried over to the bedrooms again, he noticed that Damien was in the door of his own, and so he head into the spare bedroom instead — the one that Damien had spent his time sleeping in.

He couldn’t stand the thought of heading over to Damien and talking it out with him. Instead, he closed the door and immediately went to call Shayne.

It was unfamiliar being in this room after all this time that had passed. He had let Damien have free reign, essentially, and the payoff of that was everything looked extremely tidy. He made a beeline for the bed, and sat on the corner of it, uncaring that he was messing up the perfectly tucked in blankets. 

He could hear a clock in the corner of the room ticking. It seemed as if it was mirroring his heartbeat, albeit less frantic. He held the phone close to his torso and rang Shayne’s personal number, feeling frantically on edge. When he held the phone up to his ear, it just seemed as if all he could hear was the swirling pressure.

Every single ring, he counted. There were ten of them - and Shayne didn’t answer at any point before a pre-recorded voice message popped into his ear.

He cursed under his breath and hung up, dialing again immediately.

All day, he would do this, he promised himself. All day if he had to -- he rose from the edge of the bed and instead began to pace around the room. His own emotions had him feeling dizzy and lightheaded. While dialing Shayne a third time, he noticed a drawer was ajar near the bed. 

Nick walked up to it, slowly sliding the drawer out so he could see what contents it held. There really wasn’t as much as he expected, either, only two pens and a notebook. He sat down on the bed again, pulling the notebook out.

It was a marbled black and white composition book, with large letters ‘writing’ on the front. At first, Nick believed that the writing had to be from the manufacturer. It looked perfect -- not just the letters being all aligned as if it were printed off font, but even the ink itself was seamlessly distributed. Damien had been a bit of a perfectionist, but this was too perfect.

He tried calling Shayne again as he opened the notebook and began flipping through it. The writing was so neat, with every letter identical as if it was done by machine. It seemed to be a journal to chronicle the time.

The pages were heavy with ink, both sides of every page written on. Damien was close to the end of the notebook. It surprised Nick. He skimmed through it, not knowing what he was even thinking he could find. The next time he heard Shayne’s voicemail, he hung up, and dialed back -- this time putting it on speaker so he could set the phone down and hold the notebook with both hands.

He was a fast reader, but he wasn’t too interested in reading things page by page. He skimmed over it, just filled to the brim with curiosity. The thought that should have been telling him that it was wrong to violate privacy like this hadn’t even occurred to him. If there was something wrong, then he needed to know, and he wanted to know now. The idea of instead going back to speak to Damien to figure it out worried him too much.

It was strange then, in the forty-something pages he scanned, that there absolutely was no mention of a certain four letter name. That should have been a huge comfort, but for some reason, he just found it even stranger. Why would Damien have brought it up then, not even twenty minutes prior?

It felt as if he kept skimming the same things over and over. There were desires in the book to go out and do more, to maybe even go through all the headache to go back overseas for a trip, knowing very well how difficult it would be to secure the necessary paperworks coming from United Americas. He read a few comments here and there about himself, how he would stop Damien from doing certain things. It wasn’t even in a tone of anger. Of course sometimes Nick had to parent him, but it seemed to be nothing major to Damien that he felt strongly enough to really bring up often. It was as if writing was just a way he needed to get it all out. 

No marriage or partnership was perfect after all, and if every single small annoyance was brought up it would eventually just bring the end. After all, he was already aware of some of the criticisms, so hammering in the same point over and over would eventually just have upset him. When Nick saw things that mentioned Damien wanted to just get back to woodworking anyway, perhaps without telling his husband, he couldn’t blame him for writing that. 

Damien could have already done it, after all, and they’d never know until the first issue arose where an injury could reveal the inner workings of Damien’s body.

Yet again, Nick attempted to dial Shayne. He was losing count how many times he had done so. 

He went to the very last page of the notebook, and a certain phrase caught his eyes.

‘Sometimes it feels like I’m only awake when I dream.’ 

There was a knock on the door.

“I need you to give me some space, Damien.”

He wanted to nip that in the bud immediately. Closing up the notebook, he put it back in the drawer where he had found it, trying to neatly arrange it in the manner that he had found it. 

“Why won’t you talk about it with me?”

His voice sounded genuinely hurt. Nick hung up on his attempt to reach Shayne yet again, and he just buried his face in his hands instead.

“Nick… Nick! This is so stupid.”

It frustrated him. He could agree with that. Everything about this was stupid. At the very least, it made no sense.

“I can’t talk about it with you.”

After his retort, he heard Damien head away from the door. The sounds of his footsteps grew fainter until he was just out of earshot. Nick didn’t know where he was going, or where he would, but he still felt so incredibly frustrated that he didn’t particularly care.

He felt like throwing the phone away from himself.

It was hard just to remember how to breath. Turning his body more toward the bed, he curled up in it, grabbing the pillow and just trying to remember the simple mantra of breathing in, breathing out. 

It hadn’t even been that long since he woke up. He knew he couldn’t just wait for Shayne to get back to him. In one final frustration fueled attempt, he dialed the number again. When it went to voicemail, he began to speak, rather passionately frustrated.

“The whole point of that new program you came up with was so their memories could be altered. You said it was more effective, Shayne. It was weeks after he died, before he could come back to me fully, weeks that we just passed off with some planted fuzzy memories about rehabilitation from an accident -- but there is absolutely no way he should know or remember a damn thing about Noah. That name should be dead to him, just.... Just as dead as your ex-boyfriend is.”

While he had been caught up in his impassioned speech, he hadn’t realized until he said it out loud that it may have been a bit callous to say that. Even though as far as Damien’s constructed memories were concerned, there should have been no hint of Shayne’s deceased partner, it was still perhaps a bit cruel to say that to Shayne himself.

“The version two took three weeks to make sure everything was going to be locked in the way that it was, and somehow, something fucked up, since he just came to me and said something about Noah. He even said he thinks he killed him! What ridiculous, backwards deal is that? How am I supposed to clean this up? Noah may have died in the same accident, but that’s just it, it was an accident.”

He stressed the last bit, through hissing his words to make a point. The anger still felt like it was consuming him, and he sat back up again.

“If you want to prove that a human has to have a soul, well, then there it is. Either he has a soul, or something is wrong. You don’t fuck up often, do you, Shayne? I just want to know why everything is falling apart again.”

There was the automated message that his voicemail would be cut off for length, asking if he was satisfied with the message left. 

This time, Nick did cave in and throw the phone to the floor.

Even Shayne had never been able to understand the residual anger he felt. When Noah died, he had moved on. The idea was so heartless and unfeeling that Nick would have never even considered it. While it was true Damien was memorialized with a plaque that stated two dates, of his birth and death, he was immortalized not just in memory but in the flesh still.

He was one of a kind, even, just like his child.

And while Nick gripped so hard at the pillow that he felt he would tear it open, he felt as if he was just as unique in the anguish he experienced.

Shayne would need a very good explanation for this. Even then, no explanation would be able to calm his fury. 

Leaving the phone on the floor, he stormed back out of the room he had invaded. He made his way out to find his partner, heavily criticizing him again the moment he saw him.

“You need to leave. You just need to leave for now.” 

Damien looked absolutely crestfallen. 

“I don’t know where, but I need you out of here.”

“Let me just grab a few things…”

The fact that he seemed even to consider the outlandish demand just upset Nick further. He wasn’t going to fight back? He wouldn’t protect himself? What a good little robot, to do as he was told! It absolutely infuriated Nick. 

“Just get out for now.”

There was so much hurt in his eyes. He clasped his own hands together, resting them on his own stomach. His ryes darted around the protections the home gave them, and he hesitated.

“You want this anyway, don’t you? You want your space? I tried to give you everything that I could and you want things that are reckless and stupid. So I want you to go.”

Damien’s eyes scanned Nick’s face, his body language too — and he found himself unable to find the smallest hint of uncertainty in the other. 

So he’d grant Nick his wish.

Turning away from him, his head slightly bowed, he’d never felt more confused or hurt in his life. But he knew the safe paths, or enough of them (granted if they were the same), so perhaps all he needed was to just get out and take a walk, take a break. 

He left at his husband’s request, like a wounded animal retreating. He’d have to try and figure out why for himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well folks, looks like the estimate of 6 chapters is indeed correct for this fic to get finished. stay tuned, next chapter is already in the works.
> 
> enjoy the vaguely mentioned cryptic dystopian apocalyptic references sprinkled throughout. there's still some in this chapter, if you didn't notice.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Even when Nick got bold after standing next to him, taking a hand from his pocket and reaching it out to grab on to Damien’s forearm, he made no move._
> 
> _“I can’t even pretend that I know what you’re thinking or why you’re out here, but I just want to make this work. Things were going so well, finally.”_
> 
> _He lowered his head, before he tilted it the slightest to face Nick._
> 
> _“You make me feel like I know things that I shouldn’t.”_
> 
> / / /
> 
> Together again, together again, only to repeat the same cycles.

Damien had been acting erratic for quite some time.

Nick hadn’t even noticed it at first — when he tried to create a timeline in his mind of how long he thought it had been happening, he found himself at a mental roadblock and he just absolutely couldn’t. It was difficult when part of it boiled down to how much he had been neglecting his husband, after all.

It seemed as if he had become obsessed with showering, lately. That’s what had put him on the scent of something possibly being wrong.

With doubt cast on him, things he had done in the past that seemed slightly odd suddenly became a huge red flag. Sure, he had gotten used to the eccentric behavior that surrounded cleanliness and certain rituals with his… it was hard to put a name on what to call it. His ‘quirkiness’, ‘issues’, ‘disease’? Any of those words fit. He had been apologetic about it since they met, tried to hide away what parts of it that he could.

He didn’t seem apologetic anymore. He seemed paranoid and fearful, as if he was already guilty of something rather than guilt from trying to fight against his anxieties.

When he had asked Nick if he smelled anything, one late night when Nick had decided to come home after saying he was just going to stay at the facility, it had seemed innocuous. After all, he had a basket of freshly done laundry in his arms at the time. The way he darted his eyes as they made smalltalk and pulled away from Nick trying to touch him, none of this alone had thrown up a red flag.

The obsessiveness to follow, however, made him think.

One day, a rare day when he was home and trying to take the smallest of rests, he found himself uneasy. When he stood in his bedroom he could hear the shower running in the background, all the way from the other bathroom that wasn’t attached to their master bedroom. 

Damien had seemed compulsive lately when it came to washing things even other than himself. There was absolutely no shirts or other clothes of his in their laundry hamper, but when he had gone to throw something away in the outer facilities he noticed a shirt in the garbage, waiting to be shredded and incinerated. It piqued his interest enough to take it out of the trash -- he didn't think it likely that there would be any contagions on it. If there had been an accident, Damien would have said something for their safety and the safety of the compound as a whole, and if he didn't, some other eyes on him would have spoken up in fear. 

The fact he hadn't spoken a word was too suspicious. He wasn't a wasteful man, he wouldn't be throwing clothing away for no reason.

There was blood splattered on it. It had to have been from some wood working accident in his little shop they had set up. The dark, dried blood was sprayed around a two inch section on the bottom of a plain dark gray-blue v-neck. 

Maybe it had just happened and Damien hadn't had a chance yet to tell him. That was possible, right? Anything could have been possible. He clutched the fabric tightly between his fingers, lifting it up to his face to inspect it.

Something compelled him to draw it closer to his face, though. He felt a little uneasy, even though before he knew it he was sniffing the shirt. He buried his nose near the collar area, taking in a deep breath.

Sure, it smelled of his husband.

The issue was, that wasn't the only scent.

It was easy to identify it as a human one, too. Some sort of light covering of a rather sharp smelling cologne. Together with Damien's scent and one of sweat, he had to pull the shirt away just because how strongly they mingled.

It wasn't right.

Something was deeply wrong, and he felt his heart immediately sink to his stomach. He clenched the shirt in his hand, his face screwed together tightly in confusion and disgust while he made his way back through the house. 

He could hear the water faucet being turned off as he walked by the bathroom. His path however was to the bedroom, so he continued on.

He just sat on the corner of the bed, feeling anger now course through his veins. He could feel his face turn warm, even. What sort of fool had he been to miss every sort of sign? Damien obviously had grown so concerned lately about personal hygiene because he was worried Nick would smell the scent of another person on him.

A door was opened and closed, and he heard footsteps. He would have to figure out what he was going to do, and quickly. He didn't want a huge confrontation, he didn't want some big fight -- and he wouldn't just push it all away, never to discuss it, but if Damien was going to leave him it couldn't be right now.

So, he took the shirt, crumpled it up in his hands, and ditched the evidence beneath the bed. It was such a juvenile way to hide it, but there was a box he was able to just throw it inside...

Damien came into their bedroom, towel around his waist with his messy hair still wet. Nick had returned to his original position sitting on the bed, and he just forced a cold, stiff smile to the other.

"Are you packed for next week?”

Despite the break, there was so much for them to do thinking about the near future. Nick knew that very soon, it’d all be over, and he told Damien that constantly — it just seemed the other man didn’t believe him like he once did.

Whatever response he gave was nonchalant. Nick just had a hard time listening to his exact words. He felt his suspicions confirmed already, and knew that he’d have to work to find out more.

Work was all he had known and strived for his whole life, though. It shouldn’t be difficult, he figured.

——————————————— 

They were in Shayne’s office, while the man himself was off at lunch. It was a conversation that Damien didn’t want to have elsewhere. It gave them both a good cover.

He had even been terribly paranoid as of late. His inability to sleep lately hadn’t helped things. It was day 9 of the supposed week that he had been staying underground, and he was terribly homesick for a cautious ray of non-artificial sunlight.

Noah was actually sitting on top of Shayne’s desk, shuffling around research papers idly. Damien was sitting on the couch across from him, sprawled out and forlorn. His flannel shirt sleeves were rolled up his arms, showing off a greenish bruise that was still fading from an IV line.

“I can’t do this anymore.”

His voice just sounded lifeless. He was exhausted, empty. 

“The next time I get prodded with needles, or cut open, or biopsied, or whatever on this unholy earth they want to do, I just can’t. I don’t have it in me anymore.”

The younger man across from him raised an eyebrow, staring at him from behind his blocky glasses. Damien continued on with his own monologue.

“I think anything that was there, I lost it for him. I know it’s not fair to not even give it a chance to work it out, but, with everything going on… I feel like the best course of action would be to just leave. Just go, somewhere, anywhere. How about that? It’s not like this is the only settlement to live at. I just want to start over.”

Noah crossed his legs, one on top of the other. He clenched the papers between his fingers, shaking his head.

“It’s not even my field but this is going to be a great advancement… There’s a reason they let him keep doing this. They really think it’s going to work, soon, and that the personal stake he has in it will just fuel it. That’s what I’ve heard, anyway. Everything you go through, he goes through too, you know?”

The look of regret that flashed on the brunet’s face was palpable.

"You _do_ know that, right?"

“I thought it would work out, even if we were from two entirely different worlds. He’s just become even colder, even more emotionless. He doesn’t care about all this, because it’s work to him. I’m just his work.”

“What are you going to do? Are you actually going to leave?”

"Leave with me.”

It was like a revelation when he looked over at his partner in their illicit affair. He spoke earnestly, from a place deep in his gut, hoping that even if he didn’t say the right things that Noah would listen and understand.

“I know this is so sudden, but, you already feel it. You know there’s something, somewhere out there more than this. You want to see it for yourself, don’t you? Instead of just reading about it, stuck to the same person you’ve been with since you started as his student. I know Shayne, he’s happy being here, forever even, but are you?”

“Damien…”  
“You're not tethered to some decision you made years ago. You’re lonely and want more. I don’t know if I can give that to you, but, I’ve seen the world and there’s more out there to it. You should take the chance to live in it.”

“Damien.”

He didn’t want to stop talking just because his name was spoken. He wanted to continue — if he kept talking, then there wasn’t room for Noah to say no. 

“I think you should just take this—“

“I'll do it.”

That, on the other hand, was enough to make him stop.

He sunk back down into his seat, having nearly been at the edge for his rousing and inspired speech. He looked over to a clock on the wall, sighing softly.

“We’ll have to talk about this more later. But I’m ready. I’m so ready to get out of this."

It wasn’t the threat of commitment that did him in. He’d already committed, but he’d overextended himself trying to keep up with demands from his husband. He’d offered so much of himself, but he had nothing left to give.

Nick could still have his medical mysteries, his man made miracles. Damien couldn’t even look over at the man across from him any longer, though, considering that he wasn’t keen on immediately changing his unwavering and undying commitment to transfer over.

A physical affair was one thing, they barely broached the emotional barrier (though, it seemed Noah felt it more than Damien did, but he had confidence he could keep it at bay for some time) and it just felt like a safe out.

He’d never been one to like being alone. There wasn’t an easy fix or cure for loneliness. Everything else, he could figure out later.

 

———————————————

The location he was at seemed awfully familiar, but Nick didn’t know why as he looked at the small electronic device in his hand. He knew right where Damien was, because of course, the top line of synthetic humans would have ways to be tracked as part of the basic package.

It just wasn’t a place he ever really went. 

When he followed the instructions to find him, it became eerily obvious why. He never even had reasons to visit any other grave sites, much less the memorial for a mass grave with names on bronze plaques hammered in to a long, thin black obelisk. Far enough down, the plaques idea had obviously been abandoned, with named etched in to the stone itself.

It was such a twisted thing to visit out of nowhere, but sure enough, Damien was there. He had his hands in his pockets, completely unmoving as he heard himself be approached. His eyes seemed to be scanning over names and numbers slowly, and Nick felt a sickness in the pit of his stomach.

If he had come out here to find the name of a dead boy he once knew, this wouldn’t be the right place. Surely, he had that common sense, right? If these immortal gods of flesh and machinery were molded to spit in the face of death and never even broach such difficult topics, something was clearly wrong.

When Nick exhaled, he could see his own breath leave his lips in the cold.

He kept his head bowed, walking right up to him and waiting for him to be the one to make some kind of acknowledgement.

Damien didn’t, however. He just continued his staring, his silent reading, looking truly mournful over these people who died long before him. Even when Nick got bold after standing next to him, taking a hand from his pocket and reaching it out to grab on to Damien’s forearm, he made no move.

“I can’t even pretend that I know what you’re thinking or why you’re out here, but I just want to make this work. Things were going so well, finally.”

He lowered his head, before he tilted it the slightest to face Nick.

“You make me feel like I know things that I shouldn’t.”

Well, to be fair, Nick thought to himself, that analysis seemed perfectly correct.

“I don’t… know why you get mad, sometimes. It’s like you have this whole game set out for me, but you just haven’t told me what rules I’m supposed to play by. It feels like I’m the only one on this planet that doesn’t know.”

“Mm…”

“People treat me _so different_.”

That phrase alone made Nick frown, and just like that he was back to feeling too ashamed to face him. Maybe he didn’t just want Damien’s heart, but his soul, as well. Maybe he wanted more than what he had to give.

“Do you remember what you told me this morning to me?”

A thin, worried smile began to crack on Damien’s lips. He held up his hand, freed from his pocket and Nick’s grip, placing it to the side of his head. His palm rested in his cheek, his fingers curled. 

“Maybe I’m sick? Sometimes I just… have the urge to say things. Things that I don’t even know what I’m saying, or why. It’s just… compulsive. I don’t know what any of it means! But then…” A sigh. “…Then I feel like I should know. It comes like, this sounds so cheesy, it comes like lightning, just flashes where I feel enlightened suddenly, but I don’t know what any of it means.”

“What you said to me this morning. Does that name mean anything to you?”

“I… No. I don’t know.”

Nick grimaced, even though this was probably the best answer he could have hoped for. He’d never been able to talk to the good doctor yet, to rail into him to try and find explanations and answers. If the worst came to the worst, he could always presumably take the nuclear option and have his memories all wiped.

“Well… One thing I should have told you maybe was about why everyone was so riled up. Why on that last day you came to see me, you were treated so different.”

Damien’s eyes looked so round and begging, almost tearful, even. The strongest desire of all, to just fit in, it still controlled him.

“The little girl was my daughter. Your daughter. Ours. She — I’d be out here all day explaining it. She’s also partly a third party, a female donor. It’s certainly not ideally efficient, but it’s what you have to do when you start with two males. Biological parenting is like taking both DNAs and unzipping the double helix, to zip them back up together in a new person, but some of that groundwork has to still come from a female. While you can work on it with two females, two males introduce more variance as well and… and I’m just trying to explain it. I’m trying to explain it anyway. The answer, more simply, is you wanted a family.”

Understandably, there was a genuine look of mortification on Damien’s face. He shook his head, trying to understand. If he had a kid, and the kid wasn’t an infant, but it was his kid and his kid was older but he hadn’t ever had a kid, nor had Nick… Then, something was missing.

“Why wouldn’t you tell me? A daughter? Mine? I don’t get it.”

He instantly had felt robbed. If he had a family, why wasn’t he a part of it? Why wasn’t Nick? How was Nick saying this so nonchalant, and how was he okay keeping it all a secret before now? 

When could this have happened, even?

“That doesn’t seem like the type of thing someone just doesn’t remember. Not unless… Unless, I don’t know. Something really _wrong_ happening.”

How in luck he was to say such a thing, really. It let Nick seamlessly continue on.

“You died.”

Damien’s jaw dropped just the slightest. He narrowed his eyes, shooting a glance over at the other man. He looked so offended and hurt at the mere suggestion, but his expression softened once he realized nothing had changed about Nick’s. He looked genuine, unfortunately. Why would he lie?

“There was an accident. A bad one. And you died, and so did someone else. And… we ended up growing your flesh. Uploading neural impulses. Blending man and machine, to where you’re warm, but you’d never bleed.”

He looked so _hurt_. So anxious and frightened. 

Nick just had to get closer to him, wrapping both of his arms around his shoulders from the side. He held on to him tightly, leaning in close to speak to him. It was hard to not let his voice crack or fluctuate.

“With everything that happened, you didn’t need all the stress of trying to adjust to a kid. She wasn’t even born when you died, she had just been completed for fertilization.”

“How long did I lose?”

The question was cautious, as if he didn’t know what he could say or couldn’t say. There were millions of other things going through his mind at the same time, but he had to try and think — were his thoughts just some predetermined programming?

“Close to three years. Well, that’s just when it happened. It’s still been almost two that you’ve been back. Almost equal time.”

“How did you hide it all? How… I’m not dead. That’s so stupid! This is ridiculous, how can I be dead when I’m right here? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Nick stepped closer, enveloping him in a tight hug.

He lowered his face in to Damien’s neck, his eyes closed as he tried to not let the world get too far away from him. 

“But I’m right here. I’m right here!”

He fought fruitlessly to try and explain himself, though there truly was no argument he had beyond what he felt. Even if Nick said he couldn’t bleed, it wasn’t as if he was stupid enough to test that out — and he sheepishly recalled how adamant Nick would be over not letting him do things that could injure him. He couldn’t remember ever before that he would do that.

When he closed his eyes, resting his face against the top of the short brown hair, he realized that he didn’t even know what he _did_ remember.

With his eyes closed he could see a window into the past, one where he was basking in the sun while Nick looked on with a disapproving fondness. He could call to the front of his mind memories of his husband drinking a bit after their marriage application was approved, and how it made his face reddish and his laughter so jovial.

He could recall the times when Nick wasn’t so cold, but when he wrapped his own arms around him and clenched the back of his jacket, he could also remember pain.

It felt dull, but the more he thought about it, it seemed like he just associated it with blinding lights. 

It seemed so specific, something just out of his grasp but that he could graze with the tips of his fingers. It was like there was so much secrecy shrouding it, but the ache he felt in his chest seemed so real.

In just a moment he relived his own death. 

It couldn’t have been instantaneous. His grip loosened on the jacket as he thought of the way this younger man had looked at him and gave a pained smile, but after the press of a button, it was just a loud flash bang.

He had told Noah he would come with him, even if Noah was having second thoughts. He had no way to know Nick had figured it out, had bugged him, had learned of their plans and had manipulated and twisted his metaphorical arm to leave Damien out of it, because he would be telling Damien that day of the successes and they would finally have their family. Everything would go back to how it was before all the experiments.

He just remembered pursuing Noah. Arguing, fighting, following him. He couldn’t even remember why he would have been following him. The conversation was too out of reach for him — just as was remembering the infidelity and the actual plans.

“Cells, organ tissue, bone marrow, blood, any muscle or brain tissue too… We used anything that wasn’t damaged. to make you.”

Hearing Nick speak brought him out of his haze. He pulled back from the other, his own hands gently resting on either side of his face. There was scruff, a five o’clock shadow on Nick’s face. When was the last time he had shaved himself? Had he ever, for the past _two years_?

“I love you. If I had to play God to have you again, then that’s what I am. Because I got you back.”

Could a man be god? Could he himself be human? 

There were no rules anymore, no rituals. 

“I have to go for a while. Just let me go. Don’t come and find me.”

The words scared Nick so much. His shoulders slumped, his throat going dry. Of course Damien had to know that he could, that he would find him again. It was his responsibility to, his duty to keep life going in their own sense of normalcy.

But, for now, he let Damien kiss him softly before he let go. There was still so much pain on his face, and he felt angered that he couldn’t remember Damien ever looking at him like that while fully alive. He hadn’t wanted to discuss his own pain, just as Nick never wanted to discuss any of this that had just come to light. 

Even as Damien walked away, he just took a few deep breaths to himself. He furrowed his brow, figuring that maybe the other now felt like he had some sense of purpose to find out _his own_ purpose. 

He would have to understand that the purpose had always been love, humanity.

He was as close to human as he could be. Naturally, Nick thought to himself, if he had gathered up everything he could, combining all his resources to make sure Damien wasn’t listless like other synths, that he could remember, that he could learn, that he could love Nick through it all… If he had found a cure for death, it absolved him from being the one who caused it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> bitch we only have one more to go merry thursday


End file.
